Remember to Forget

That phrase came to me a few days ago; what it means I'm not sure other than part of the art of living, and living with another specifically is elective forgetting.  Not all enemies and antagonists must last forever.  In other words, a husband is a man you haven't shivved.  Yet.  (It's a joke, calm down, calm down.  If you don't believe me, call him.  He's sitting by the phone waiting to hear from The One who will make America Great Again.)

I feel I owe Someone Something this morning because GodKnows™ this post won't write itself.  And in that way it resembles almost anything else in my life except the certainly of mortal decay.  Anyway, it is spring and the itch I've felt for weeks to throw my crutches away and walk unaided into the light will now be indulged.  I, like much of the natural world, am molting.  Had to drop the latest math class because I was never going to get more than a C- and an aneurysm in the process.  And now don't yet know how to finish what I started.

Cuthbert, in his manly wisdom, being kind says to me, "Well, now you can focus on something you do well."  Translation:  I.  Told.  You.  So.  (Believe when I tell you that remarks like the above are what pass for compassion in our marriage.)  He's got a point -- a wiser woman than I would have pursued the social sciences, or the arts.  And as excited as I am by them, the many subjects that fall under those classifications are not ones I want to teach.  At least not occupationally.  I wants to teach Math (or Maths as our friends across the pond say).  And I'm not entirely convinced that it is impossible for a woman who hasn't always eaten her spinach (and is now paying for it).

And there is the matter of the job.  I work for a world class university and, at least in the stratum I occupy, because of that I have extraordinary employee benefits.  When you've reached the stage of life where you actually study those Social Security statements that come in the mail, benefits such as retirement savings and health insurance matter.  Perhaps too much but they do.  I've had a glimpse of the ardors of old age, the burden it is on your children, and frankly, I wouldn't blame Daughter No. 1 if she puts a pillow over my head and Daughter No. 2 serves as lookout.  (As long as they don't talk while they're doing it.  I hate to miss a good conversation and my hearing's shit anyway.)  The job itself and the goodies it provides will be hard to abandon.  The running joke in my house is that Cuthbert so loves the University's health facilities that he'll be pushing my wheelchair to the office when I'm 99 years old just so we'll still be covered. And right now, that's as good a life plan as any.

For now.

A Letter to My Faithful Readers

... and to the porn sites which account for 90% of my traffic.  It has been 3 months and change since I last posted.  I stopped blogging for practical reasons:  my life was organized around the care of a dying friend.  I had no desire to write about "it" then, and I am reluctant to write about it now.  The irony is that many of us (in my generation) sculpted ourselves into fiction writers by confessing, mining the travails of our own lives and convincing ourselves that it represented the anxieties of the age.  Had I that need still there would be plenty of entries here, but I don't so there aren't.

It's spring.  Like many in the northeast I had my doubts that it would ever arrive.  I've been awarded for my patience with a front yard that is filling out with strawberries, echinacea, hydrangeas, day lilies, ferns, daisies, oxalis, clover, mint, sage and more than a few spectacular flowering weeds.  During the winter I would sit in my dining room willing the plants into existence, wondering if last year's volunteer squash would take over by late summer, imagining what color the hydrangea blossoms would be.  Now I happily bury the stools of the feral cats that use our yard as their litter box, pull and slice the roots off of weeds so that they can be composted.  And think.

I've been dreaming lately.  A few nights ago I had one where I was practically stalking the Math department's advisor to figure out what my next class should be.  (You don't have to go to far back into last fall's entries the discern the magnitude of my bitchin' and moanin' about how hard my coursework is.)  Nobody in my family believes that I will or should return to school.  (I didn't enroll the spring semester.)  That, too, is an old story.  But, I have spent a lot of time with people who have been delimited by physical illness, mental illness, addiction, and poverty.  One of the enduring effects of any of those conditions is the the lowering of expectations.  Of being defined by what one can't do as opposed to what one can.  And once you've bought that definition of yourself, you've taken over the maintenance of your oppression.  Then it's game, set, match for the oppressor.  Math is my instrument; public school students and adult learners are my audience.  To have the math to work with them I have to do more coursework.  It's as simple as that.

And last night I dreamed that I was in prison, but mysteriously released on furlough.  I spent it at a bar with a friend talking and drinking coffee, surrounded by totebags of paperwork and clothing.  I knew that I had to return to prison.  My friend, who had been imprisoned but was now paroled left to catch the subway.  I packed my bags, and then at the last minute decided I wasn't going back.  Fuck it, I said to myself, I'm an old lady.  Whadda they going to do to me?

Which is the attitude I've been taking now that I'm bike riding again, occasionally without a helmet after a (clears throat) 40 year interregnum.  Cuthbert and even strangers counsel me to do otherwise.  Of course they're right.  I know all too well what can happen and godknows this city has more than its share of reckless and unlicensed drivers.  But, oh freedom, and all of that.  It feels so good to fly down the street and split the air.

Perhaps these latest dreams about about the poles of Freedom and Obligation.  And the dance between the two as I enter my 60th year.  Don't know; may never know.  The sun's up; weeds await me.
 

This Will Be Brief ...

... because -- you know -- I've got systems of linear equations to solve.

A snapshot of my life:

1.  This is my month off as a wife.  Cuthbert is visiting the family in Ireland.  This means several things -- I have to cook for myself, I'm the head Home Skooler for Lilli, the house stays, if not immaculate, at least tidy and clean, and I don't have to use my we're-in-the-middle-of-a-firefight voice.

2.  Three times a week I meet Lilli at the bus stop and we snack, read and learn.  She is doing a traffic study.  We go to the grassy knoll and she counts cars at rush hour.  Each expedition she chooses a different color -- first day red, next time gray, and so on.  She records the day, date and time and the number of cars of a certain color that passed by in 5 minutes.  When she is done with fieldwork we'll look at the data and construct a pie chart or a bar graph.

3.  This week the daily temperatures went from the low 90's to the 70's.  I suffer from summer PTSD.  The hotter it gets the more I hate life.

4.  I am cooking.  Easy stuff that I can do.  Today, having been brave and and thawed a packet of pollock.  (What a great title -- A Packet of Pollock, A Gaggle of Geese) I'm all in for cooking.  Even found an easy recipe.  So as not to repeat the fiasco of a September past I will stay in the kitchen and study while the fish broils.  I'm slow, but I do learn.  If it's good I'll ask L&L to come over for dinner.  If not, well those goddamn feral cats that use my backyard as a litter box will get their version of The French Laundry.  Anyway, what do I care?  There's always popcorn.

5.  As Cuthbert predicted, New Haven's mayoral primary was decided along tribal lines.  Tribes of race and class.  Reminds me that this is essentially a very conservative town.  What I wouldn't give to be a NYC voter right now!  Crazy Anthony Weiner?  Bill Blasé-Former-President-of-the-NYC-Board-of-Education-Warmed-Over-Placeholder Thompson?  Bill de Blasio who's got a son who looks like what Michael Jackson should have looked like at 16?  Christine-I-Woulda-Been-A-Better-Fireman Quinn?  What's not to love about that field?!?!?!

So it's study, class, gym, home, cook, clean, iron and sleep.  A quiet life.  Ciao, bella!

A Gift of Thanksgiving

Truth be told the bar is getting lower.  As far as my math course goes, I just want to finish all the while learning what I can.  Knowing that it is superficial and prone to being washed away the moment I stop attempting proofs in a particular section.  All of this is now a rehearsal to take this class again.  Getting back on the horse.  Hair of the dog.  yadda yadda yadda.  So far I haven't looked at my midterm grade because it will contribute to my disappointment, it will do nothing to make it any easier for me to work one problem at a time.  A post or so before, I likened this experience to pregnancy.  Now extending the metaphor, a stillbirth.  It will have a name and it will leave its traces and if you look closely you will see evidence of having had the experience.  But not the one I expected and hoped for.

So, a gift to me and to us all is Krista Tippett's interview with Brené Brown. 

Gettin' My Geek On

Cuthbert found this t-shirt and I actually thought it was hilarious.  The screw has turned:

 

No Baby Einstein, Moi

I know.  I know.  It's been 2 weeks to the day.  You've kept up your end of the bargain by reading, and I have not.  But, even if Reading is Fundamental™ Math is Hard, yo.  And I had a mid-term and last week was the culmination of months of work towards the Congo in Harlem film series, and Cuthbert has returned from Ye Olde Sod and math is still hard.  Even my beloved niece, who attends St. Whozit, and who laid her mother and uncle on the floor as in ROFLMAO when she announced that they make the 1st graders study Math and other terrible things at her school, even she offered to help me with my homework.  I did not refuse her.

As some of you may know, we have been doing proofs.  As in prove that:

3√2 – 7 is irrational

   5  

Now, I've been called irrational and have been presented with sufficient evidence that proves it, but this is an altogether other matter and one that takes time.  I offer this in demi-apology for not writing while studying for the midterm.  I did okay, iff the professor grades on a curve.  The range of test scores out of a possible 100 were 7 to 93.  But, two months into this class my expectations are tumbling faster than Felix Baumgartner.  I'm just tryin' to get out of this one alive.  Have mercy ...

I have also discovered (not for the first time) that math makes you stupid.  That is, the more higher mathematics you study the more arithmetic you forget.  (One common complaint on these tests are the oh no you din'it! algebraic errors one makes that Cost Points.  I mean I had the definition of the negation of a limit dead to rights and then wrote:  |‌‌x-a| ≥ ∂, etc. ‌‌instead of |x-a| < ∂.  Oh, the shame.  But even stupider than that is what I did at dinner last night.  It's raining.  It's Friday.  Cuthbert and I have already eaten the low-hanging fruit -- the crackers, the cheese, the peanuts, and truth-be-told, neither of us wanted to cook dinner.  (Heh, heh as I pretend I'm ever willing to cook dinner.)  So, we decide to go out and he finds a new place close by, The New Haven Meatball House.  We go there, and have a meal served by a friendly young man with ear plugs which I always associate with the Maasai and other East African people, and the young man suggested we try some beers and when I said I liked 'em dark and stout (self-portrait as a glass of beer?) he started talking about beers like sommeliers talk about wine and brought me something fruity and dark called the Vampireslayer, and yeah buddy (as they say in Louisiana) it was good.  Great meal -- 2 main dishes, 4 exquisite beers, dessert and coffee -- great service all while Cuthbert and I discuss Christopher Hitchens, Niall Ferguson and Mitt Romney.  We get the check.  I calculate the tip, do the addition, sign off and we leave.

Just before we pulled into the driveway I realized that I'd made a mistake.  When we get in the house I start harassing Cuthbert -- get me the phone number! google the restaurant! don't you know he has to enter in the amount I signed and hurry up hurry up hurry up!!!.  When he wasn't fast enough I remembered I had the receipt and poured out my purse to find it and breathlessly, boozily called the restaurant and said:  Oh, no!  I just ate at your place and I added wrong and the total should actually be ...  Turns out the person I talked to was the person, Juan, who served us and he had my receipt and he was probably cursing out the sociopathic cheapskate who just up and left him a $5 tip.  And I made right by him and we signed off as BFF and damnit, math is hard.

Garbo Cooks

Yes.  I surprise myself in this soon to end month of Bachelorettehood.  I have cooked, and eaten the results.  But, more important than that I have actually devoted mental energy into figuring out how to cook what I cook better.  This is all so new for me, I blush.  It helps that it's fall and there are great vegetables nearby.  I am agnostic about what I prepare.  Yesterday, I was making spaghetti sauce and almost sauteed a spider who lived in one of our iron skillets.  (Makes me look bad, if not a liar, no?)  I said almost.

Anyway, I plan to keep this up.  Hell, I need a win.  Ye Olde Math Class is giving me, if not quite nightmares, anxious dreams.  It is phenomenally beautiful and unusually warm these days, but I am in a permanent state of crankiness and misanthropy.  And, why, you may ask?  Okay, help me with this:

Prove or disprove the following statement:

There exist rational numbers a and b such that a^b is irrational.

 If you can't, leave me alone.  I'm off to look up some fish recipes.  I hear fish helps.




 

This Is What Being slightly < 60 Look Like

This is what getting older is like: Turns out I have sciatica.  I can pinpoint when it would have started over 20 years ago.  A 3 mile stroll down Flatbush Avenue on a blistering August day with 9 year old chatting me up and a suitcase on my back.  (Another day, another dispatch.)  Undiagnosed, ignored, I'm now certain it is the cause of the burning, rubber-banded, hey-did-I-step-on-a-bottle-cap? feeling I often have in my right leg.  But you know what?  I'm so bored by all the maladies large and small that visit me at this age, I haven't even bothered to google it.  Meh.  I'll see my internist soon enough.  "Doctor, will I ever be able to dance the Running Man again?"  Ha, ha cuz I couldn't dance it before .....  (Snares, please!  Rimshot!)

So, quiz #1 is over.  I barely got half the problems right.  I could have done better were it not for a stupid stupid mistake on a truth table.  Forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.  But, what really blows my whistle is that there isn't a person in that class of that thinks I should be there.  Here's what I've learned in 3 semesters:  that the higher you go in mathematics the whiter and more male it gets.

Don't these boys know I grew up in I-O-W-A where underestimating and denigrating negroes is and always has been a sport and a pasttime?  And don't these boys knows that they've wakened the competitiveness in Aunt Jemina?

It's on, ya'll ...